The Economics of Star Trek — Editor’s Picks — MediumThe key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward. Does that make a system inherently communist? I don’t think it does. People work. They get paid. It is market driven, and not centrally planned. In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher? The only thing we really need to do is take this to a logical extreme: that people can still get paid doing zero work.

What the hell is a pixel?So to future CSS designers: We are sorry for the confusion we caused you. Just try to forget about the pixel and it's now meaningless original definition. To you a pixel is just an arbitarily small dot. To us it will always be the size of the ball in pong.

Your 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour | Jeff ArchibaldYour 60-hour work week is not a badge of honour. It is a problem. There is a sense of pride over being able to state that we worked an exorbitant amount of hours this week, last week, or last month. But as you dig into the 60-hour work week, you realize it is a problem. Not just for the obvious reasons either, like work/life balance, burnout, how unhealthy it is, errors that come with being tired and so forth.

The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken – Scientific AmericanThese new insights into the chicken mind hint that certain complex cognitive abilities traditionally attributed to primates alone may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. The findings also have ethical implications for how society treats farmed chickens: recognizing that chickens have these cognitive traits compels moral consideration of the conditions they endure as a result of production systems designed to make chicken meat and eggs as widely available and cheap as possible.

Marvel gives comic book characters their own APIFrom Captain America and Spider-Man to Wolverine and Iron Man, Marvel Entertainment, a Disney subsidiary, has built an empire by bringing more than 8,000 characters to life through a diverse array of mediums, including comic books, movies and other entertainment properties. Now, it’s giving those characters a new medium to inhabit: the world of the API.

Système DYou can tell you've got your competitors rattled when they start producing knocking copy about you. It's a testament to the success of OpenStreetMap that TomTom, the troubled, declining manufacturer of satnavs (PNDs) and geodata vendor, has published a rather cynical example of FUD about "open-source maps".

Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet via reddit.comThis is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Print – The Last Meal – EsquireA two-ounce songbird. A lemon-sized tumor. An imperial appetite for death, flesh, and the immortal gesture. It was time for dinner.

Photographs of Napoleon’s Veterans | HOW TO BE A RETRONAUTPhotographs of veterans of Napoleon’s Grande Armée and the Guard wearing their original uniforms and insignia. Likely date May 5, 1858 – all are wearing the Saint Helene medal, issued on August 12, 1857 to all veterans of the wars of the Revolution and the Empire. May 5 – the anniversary of the death of Napoleon.

March 2011 Update – Strategic PlanningEn nu hopen dat ze er écht iets aan doen: "Here’s what we think the Editor Trends Study tells us: Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of people were still trying to become Wikipedia editors. What had changed, though, is that they were increasingly failing to integrate into the Wikipedia community, and failing increasingly quickly. The Wikimedia community had become too hard to penetrate."

7 myths about paper prototyping"Many information architects are obsessed with wireframes but in most projects, they aren't needed: they are just a bureaucratic overhead. You'll find that an electronic prototype, modified as the project progresses, provides a much more useful design communication tool than a wireframe."

Jared Spool – Anatomy of a Design Decision on VimeoThe best designs come from not one, but hundreds of well-made decisions. The worst designs arise out of hundreds of poorly-made decisions. All that stands between you and a great design is the quality of your decisions. Where do they come from?For the last five years, we’ve been studying how designers make their decisions. When do they use outside information, such as research about their users? When do they go with their gut instinct? When do the designers look to past decisions and the lessons they’ve learned?

Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are “Blind” To 80 Percent Of Apple iOS DevicesApple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads.